The Tories want another referendum

The Conservatives have finally come out in favour of a second referendum – except this time on… the removal of hereditary peers from the House of Lords!

Shadow Foreign Office minister Andrew Rosindell yesterday called for a vote on Labour’s policy of axing the hereditaries, telling the House of Commons “the British people should have a say in a referendum”. Labour’s 2024 manifesto stated its intention to remove all remaining 92 hereditary peers from the Lords.

Holding the Brexit referendum in 2016 cost an estimated £129.1m, according to the Electoral Commission, even before the vast costs of actually leaving the European Union.

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Now the Tories want to do it all again, this time on the esoteric principle of allowing people to make laws for life on the basis of who their great-great-grandparents were. “This is constitutional vandalism, and it is destroying the continuity that has made this place so effective and so special for so many centuries,” Rosindell told Parliament yesterday.

“This is clearly being done with a political motivation, which I think is thoroughly wrong. If we make a constitutional reform, at very least the British people should have a say in a referendum.”

Kemi Badenoch has repeatedly said she would be focusing on the priorities of the British people. Apparently that’s holding an expensive and unnecessary referendum on allowing 80-something hereditaries to keep using the House of Lords as London’s most exclusive gentleman’s club!